Practically every airline, as a promotional vehicle, has a mileage award program. These programs are designed to provide, particularly frequent business flyers, with an incentive to fly on that particular airline. Over the years, these programs have had their intended affect and many of these frequent flyers not only have developed brand loyalty for a particular airline but will go to great lengths to ensure that they take that particular airline to obtain award miles even when the trip is a non-direct route and direct routes arc were available on other airlines. The main reason for this is to maximize the accumulated award miles in a particular mileage award program.
The travel industry, in general, has seized upon the airline mileage award programs to partner with the airlines to provide incentives for frequent flyers to use their services. For example, many hotels provide frequent flyers with the ability to receive award miles based on the amount spent on a stay at the hotel. Many of these hotels provide the frequent flyer with the ability to select the particular airline award program to which the hotel-generated award miles may be applied. The car rental companies also have provided award miles to airline award programs in the same of similar way as hotels.
Travel agents have promoted the collaborative efforts of travel industry members. These travel agents will attempt to hook trips so that the frequent flyers may maximize the amount of award miles that can he applied to a particular mileage award program.
Frequent flyers use the award miles for many different purposes. Two of the main purposes for redeeming mileage awards from awards programs are for upgrading the class of service that a frequent flyer will have on a particular flight and for vacations. This latter use is the situation in which the frequent flyer wants to accumulate the greatest number of award miles possible so he or she will be able to redeem mileage awards for him- or herself, and also for members of the flyer's family. So, if the frequent flyer is part of typical family of four, there may be the need for frequent flyer to have accumulated from 100,000 to 120,000 award miles to be able to obtain the required number of tickets to go on vacation together without the need to purchase airline tickets or separate the family to fly on more than one airline, as will be discussed.
One of the main problems with the awards programs as they presently exist is that it does not permit the mileage award program participant to fully maximize the number of accumulated award miles. For example, in simple upgrade situations in which the amount of award miles that are needed to upgrade a class of service is from 5000 to 10,000 award miles, there is usually not a problem because a frequent flyer normally will have a greater number of accumulated award miles than this. However, this changes significantly when the frequent flyer is attempting to redeem a number of awards for a family vacation or international travel. Under these circumstances, the frequent flyer may have a large number of accumulated award miles but the frequent flyer may find that he or she does not have quite enough miles to obtain all of the tickets needed (but may be close).
In some cases, when the frequent flyer has accumulated award miles in more than one airline award program, he or she will redeem mileage awards in two programs, and then split the family and part will go on one airline and the remainder will go on another airline, even though, it would have been far more desirable to travel together. In situations, where there is international travel and the frequent flyer's accumulated award miles fall just short of the amount needed to redeem an award, the frequent flyer may just not go or it may have to just pay for the ticket at the best price possible because of the inability to effective use the miles that have been accumulated.
The airlines have made some attempt to permit award program participants to use part of the accumulated award miles by allowing the participant to apply his or her miles to segments of the trip. However, this use is for class of service upgrades. Further, this use, in actuality, does not solve the problem of allowing frequent flyers to maximize the use of their accumulated award miles.
An airline that offers a particular award program is losing significant revenue by requiring that award program participants to have the exact or greater number of accumulated award miles to be able to redeem an award. Moreover, these airlines are failing to increase brand loyalty which would increase if these airlines would allow frequent flyers to redeem mileage awards when they may be a little short of the required award miles.
The present airline award programs do not provide a method by which award program participants can combine their accumulated award miles with an appropriate amount of money to satisfy the amount that the participant is deficient in award miles without purchasing a ticket. For example, if the frequent flyer has accumulated 79,343 award miles and wanted to take his family on a vacation and this frequent flyer is a loyal user of that particular airline. If a round-trip tickets for the frequent flyer's family of four is 20,000, each then the frequent flyer could redeem sufficient miles for three tickets but would not be able to obtain the fourth ticket because he or she would only have 19,343 accumulated award miles to apply to the last ticket. The frequent flyer has two alternatives to deal with this situation. The first, so that the entire family can travel together, is to simply obtain three tickets by redeeming award miles and purchasing the fourth ticket. The second, as is normally the case, one of the parents will travel with one child and the other parent will travel separately with the other child on a different airline. This is done by redeeming mileage awards in the award program of two different airlines if the frequent flyer or their spouse is lucky enough to have sufficient accumulated miles with a different airline, which is not always the case. However, even if the second alternative is available, there usually are significant logistical problems in trying to coordinate the travel plans of the family groups in departing from, and arriving at, a desired location, and returning home.
These and other problems are overcome by the system and method of the present invention.